Ladies and Gentlemen

by Adam Ross

  “Who’s that?” the boy asked.

  “A person I know,” Ashley said.

  “Who?”

  “Just someone.”

  “Is he your friend?”

  “Maybe I should go,” Thane said.

  “Look, don’t worry about it.”

  “Thanks.”

  “It’s probably just a story.”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Everything else good?”

  “Good. Great job in Roanoke. Beautiful house in the mountains. You?”

  “Good.” She set her children down, and they scrambled off. “Busy.” The boy screamed again. “Life.”

  “I know what you mean.”

  “Take care,” she said. “And Roddy?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Don’t go there, okay?” She was referring to the incident, though he knew she really meant something else altogether.

  “Good-bye,” he said.

  After their conversation, he sat staring at the telephone. Finally, after a period of time he couldn’t measure, he grabbed his car keys and left the office.

  He taped a note on the classroom door saying the seminar was canceled, then got in his car and drove downtown, having no idea where he was going or why. Downtown was only ten miles from the university, but there was a wreck on the interstate and he was stuck in traffic, just another vehicle in a long line of taillights inching forward, of tailpipes blowing steam into the air, stop-starting by inches toward whatever destruction lay ahead for them to slow down and gaze upon. Then everything came to a complete halt. Thane sat in the endless line with his foot on the brake until he grew tired and put the car in park. Drivers were getting out of their cars to look, a few even sitting on their hoods, their bodies blanched of color from the headlights behind them. Thane opened his own door for a moment but didn’t unbuckle his seat belt, just looked at the road and, for reasons he didn’t understand, reached down to touch the pavement: it was cold. Then he closed the door and cut the ignition. To his right was a family of four, two little girls in back watching separate screens attached to the back of their parents’ headrests, their faces ablaze with cartoons. Their father’s hands were fixed on the wheel in a pantomime of driving, his wife’s face illuminated by the ghostly light from her PDA. To Thane’s left, a woman in a business suit was painting her nails. He heard a roar and saw her look up as a Life Flight helicopter passed directly overhead, so low that the drivers standing on the road ducked and winced, their clothes rippling with the rotors’ spill. The craft shrank quickly into the distance and soon all was silent again. “No good news arrives by helicopter,” a doctor friend had once told him, and he thought of what Ashley had said—“Don’t go there”—and then remembered Donato’s note in his pocket. He imagined calling him, threatening to alert the police if he didn’t let him come by immediately. He wanted to see the man Donato was protecting, to stand before him, to smell his fear, to hear what he had to say, if only to make sure he was real. Thane put the car in drive, looked at the median to his left, and saw he could make a U-turn out of this mess. It would mean something, wouldn’t it? To break from his character, his story. To seize something. And he wondered: Was the old wisdom true? If you entered the dragon’s lair, challenged and defeated the beast, were all its riches then yours? Or was there a succession of beasts, of one battle after another with no final outcome, no rest between victories? Because the world seemed too wide, its fortunes too random, and its blessings too fleeting to honor one man’s bravery—or to punish his cowardice. Yet in the end, something must be done.

  The Suicide Room

  We were sitting on the floor of Will’s dorm room, smoking pot, when the conversation turned to death.

  “My sister, Elise, saw her boyfriend get killed in a car wreck,” Casey said. She exhaled contemplatively, blowing a stream of smoke toward the lit end of the joint, which she held like a cigarette. “They’d left this party together. But they were in separate cars. And … what was his name—Doug! He was driving behind her. He had all these kids from the party piled in his dad’s Mustang. Apparently he wasn’t drunk or anything, but they were driving on this winding road along the coast near our house, and the next thing Elise sees in the rearview mirror is the Mustang crashing through the guardrail and going over the cliff.”

  “She saw this?” Alyssa said.

  Casey passed her the joint and she took a hit even though she didn’t like pot. Casey and Will were both seniors; they’d been a couple since the dawn of time. I was going to break up with Alyssa that night, but she didn’t know it yet. It was 1986, and we’d just started our sophomore year.

  “Just like I said, she saw them go over the cliff. That was it.”

  “Did the other kids in the car die?”

  I couldn’t tell if Alyssa was really taken with the story, or just trying to feign deep concern to a girl higher up on the social ladder.

  “Yes,” Casey said. “And no. Including Dave, the boyfriend, there were five kids in the car, and three of them died, one ended up a paraplegic, and the fifth, who wasn’t wearing a seat belt, got thrown from the car and hooked on a branch. He hung there like a cartoon character until the fire department came.”

  “You’re full of shit,” Will said.

  Casey shot him a look. “I’m not full of shit.” They already communicated like an eternally married couple, their expressions registering with each other as clearly as if they were telepathic. “This was a legendary tragedy in my high school and a defining moment in my sister’s life.”

  “There’s no such thing as a defining moment,” Will said. “We invent defining moments.”

  “Well, aren’t you a fucking philosopher.”

  “How come I’ve never heard this story before? How did this one escape me?”

  “Maybe you weren’t listening. You never listen.” She burst out laughing. We all did, then stared at one another’s feet.

  “I don’t know anyone personally who’s died,” Alyssa said after a while. “Not that I’m rushing to have that experience.” She was part Lebanese and had short dark hair, olive-colored skin, and enormous brown eyes—just heart-stoppingly beautiful. Occasionally I caught Will looking at her, enthralled, and it pleased me. She was trophy-pretty and just as smart as hell, and there was a feeling of one-upmanship in his admiration of her that I couldn’t help but enjoy.

  “But my brother was born with the umbilical cord wrapped around his neck and it caused severe brain damage, so I guess he’s kind of dead.”

  Alyssa considered her brother for a moment. She had that far-off look you don’t realize you get when you’re stoned. I thought she might even cry, though she was rarely sentimental about Danny. I personally found him frightening, and not at all worthy of tears.

  I’d met him this past summer—though you don’t meet Danny so much as see him—when I’d spent the weekend with Alyssa at her house, ostensibly to take care of her younger sister and brother while her parents went out of town, but really so we could fuck every free minute that we had. Danny was the eldest sibling and very tall, easily six foot two. He was olive-skinned like his sisters, but slack-looking in the eyes. We all stood in the kitchen together while Alyssa’s mother laid down the law for the weekend, and Alyssa’s father, who was a plaintiffs’ attorney for Vietnam veterans and scary rich, was standing with Danny and me by the padlocked kitchen cabinets. (Even the refrigerator had a digital keypad.) Danny was shifting his weight back and forth and watching his father the way a dog watches someone eat, which Mr. Richardson eventually noticed.

  “You want some cereal?” he asked Danny.

  Alyssa’s father stood with his hands in his pockets, looking at his son warmly, almost proudly. There was an element of self-consciousness to the whole display, and I observed it carefully, because I enjoy moments when people think they’re fooling me.

  To his father’s question, Danny made a happy grunt like, Gyah.

  “Let’s get you some cereal, kid.”

&nb
sp; Mr. Richardson unlocked the top cabinet, where the cereal was kept, right in front of Danny, who obviously couldn’t remember the combination, and in front of me, of course, as if to demonstrate that no matter how brutally retarded his son was, the two of them could communicate man-to-man, as if asking him if he’d like a bowl of Crunchberries was like going to a bar together to knock back a few beers. I thought the whole performance was sad, and though I listened attentively while Mr. Richardson showed me where the combinations for the locks were kept—literally every cabinet was padlocked—perhaps I appeared intimidated by the whole thing, because Alyssa gently pressed her hand on my back and whispered for me not to worry, that she’d handle feeding her brother.

  The next morning I went to the kitchen to get some orange juice, and when I closed the refrigerator door Danny was standing there looking down at me, as naked as the day he was born and scaring me silly. Danny gave an amazed laugh, and pointed at the juice—“Joos,” he said, “Joos”—and then went for it with both hands, wiggling his fingers delightedly. He took the carton out of my terrified grasp and proceeded to drink the whole gallon, the liquid running down the sides of his mouth. He was like a giant goldfish, I realized. The padlocked cabinets suddenly made sense; they were there to protect him from blowing himself up. He finished and looked at me and said, “Ahhhhh,” then burped wetly, handed the empty carton back, and peered over my shoulder into the lit shelves, but I’d managed to lock the door before he could raid anything else. Needless to say, I got the hell out of there as fast as I could.

  “That doesn’t count as a death,” I told Alyssa.

  “We mean death in the pornographic sense,” said Casey.

  “As in eyewitnessed,” Will said.

  “I saw my grandfather get killed,” I offered.

  “No,” Alyssa said.

  I nodded. “He was a big cigar smoker. Loved to smoke them while he golfed, read the paper, took a shit. I smell cigars and I think of him. It’s Pavlovian. Anyway, two years ago, he was eighty-four and healthy as a horse and then he went to light a cigar in his workshop—he made his own golf clubs—and the lighter blew up in his face.”

  “What?” Will said.

  “Blew up. Apparently he’d filled it with the wrong fluid and it was explosive. I came down to his workshop just by chance afterward and he was rolling on the floor trying to put himself out.”

  “Shut up,” Casey said. She was thin in the face and flat-chested and liked to reach out and touch the people she was talking with—she had my forearm in her hands at that very moment. She was so confident in her sexuality, so sure of how she took hold of you or pulled you toward her, she was like a full-grown woman. We’d been fucking for a few weeks now, unbeknownst to Will or Alyssa. This all seemed dangerous and delightful to me at the time, and so far as I was concerned none of this sneaking around had any real moral weight.

  “So what happened?” Alyssa said. She began rubbing my neck while Casey still had my arm in her hands and was giving me a delicious Indian burn. I wanted Will to disappear, or fall unconscious.

  “I put him out. But I made this terrible mistake, though I didn’t know it was at the time. I threw my shirt over his face to snuff out the flames, and his skin stuck to the fabric.”

  Will winced. Both girls stopped cold.

  I affected a faraway look. Not indifferent, more transfixed. “By then, my grandmother had come downstairs and had seen what was happening, and called 911. The medics came. It was totally insane. Anyway, he suffered third-degree burns on his neck and face and died of an infection a few days later.”

  This elicited a stunned silence. Finally, Will said, “I don’t think I can top that.”

  “Top it?” Casey said. “Are you sick? This is his grandfather.”

  “It’s all right. I’m okay with it. He lived a good life.”

  “You were so brave,” Alyssa said.

  I was lying through my teeth, of course. My grandfather loved golf but hated cigars, and he was still very much alive. I’d heard this story from a high school friend over the summer and thought it was remarkable, so I’d adopted it and given it wings—I added the bit about the shirt—and told it every chance I got. It conferred on me, I thought, a bizarre sort of glamour.

  “My personal and only witnessed-death story,” Will jumped in, “was my uncle Nick’s, who, I should add, I didn’t like. He had lung cancer and it spread everywhere, though in spite of this he kept busy dying for what seemed like, I don’t know, a year. Toward the end, there was this big family gathering—he was my mother’s brother—out at his house in Seattle, which so far as I could figure out as a kid was a wait-around-for-Uncle-Nick-to-die party. I mean this literally. That’s why I thought we were there. There were flowers everywhere and even a casket in the dining room, which at one point Uncle Nick went to lie in just to get the feel of it, and that was a strange thing to see. But I thought this was kind of the opposite of a birthday party and that at some point, just like the cake coming out, the guy was eventually going to sign off. I was seven years old and the concept of death only made sense to me as a very long trip you took, somewhere remote and possibly even fun, in spite of all the grief I’d been seeing, so I was actually pretty excited. For the party my uncle’s hospital bed had been moved into the living room and there were people everywhere, drinking, eating, talking. He’d been on the verge of croaking for so many months I guess nobody felt like it should interfere with a good time. Anyway, after what seems like so long I can barely contain myself, my mother comes up to me crying and says, ‘Will, it’s time to say good-bye to Uncle Nick.’ And because it was time for me to say good-bye, and because kids always think they’re the center of the universe, I thought he was going to die right then—and that I was somehow holding everything up. So I hurry over to his bedside. The guy had so many tubes coming out of him he looked like he was lying in a plastic hammock. I’m sitting there pumping my leg and he’s staring at the ceiling, and I don’t know what to do. I don’t know if I’m supposed to sing some song or say a magic word, so I wait as patiently as I can until he finally notices me and says, ‘Who are you?’ ‘I’m Will,’ I say. ‘That means nothing to me,’ he says. ‘Be more specific.’ ‘You’re my uncle,’ I say. ‘I’m your sister’s son.’ ‘Which sister?’ ‘Jenny.’ He says, ‘Oh.’ Then he looks up at the ceiling again and says, ‘My death doesn’t belong to me. That’s the thing about dying slowly. You’re not dead yet, but people are already fitting your last rites into their schedule. You can see it in their eyes. This might be the last time I see him. There’s no dignity in that. Do you understand?’ ‘No,’ I say. ‘No? Well, let’s make it simple. Try to die quick. Not soon, but quick. Get it?’ ‘Yes, sir.’ He doesn’t speak for a while and I start to get anxious again because I still don’t know what to do, but then he looks at me and goes, ‘Do you want to know what pains me most about my life? The thing I regret most?’ I’m like, ‘Sir?’ ‘The women I could’ve fucked,’ he says, ‘but didn’t. It’s all I think about. I lie here, start chronologically, and go back as far as sixth grade to some time as recent as last year, thinking about all the opportunities for pussy that I didn’t take, and it makes me want to cry. Do you like girls?’ ‘No,’ I say. ‘Well, I did. I do. And I should have fondled Milly Bear’s fat tits before I met your aunt Carol. I should’ve squeezed Liz Coleman’s ass and sucked Kathy Koch’s nipples. But I didn’t because I was afraid. Know why?’ ‘No.’ ‘Because I thought it meant something not to. That holding myself back registered somewhere. But it means nothing not to. It doesn’t register anywhere. I want you to remember that. Tell me you’ll remember.’ ‘I will.’ ‘Good,’ he says. ‘Someone is spared.’ Then he puts his hands over his eyes and lays there mumbling these women’s names, and I can’t stand it because I’m not only getting bored with the Q & A, but also tired of waiting for the main event. So I say, ‘Uncle, can I ask you something?’ And then he coughs really hard for a while and finally gasps, ‘Go ahead.’ And I say, ‘Are y
ou going to die now?’ And he looks at the ceiling and says, ‘Yes, now I’m going to die.’ Then he made a sound like a tire deflating, and boom, I swear to God, my aunt Carol keels over right behind us, dead of a massive aneurysm.”

  For some reason, this story just killed me—I was sure Will meant it to be funny—and I laughed so hard I went fetal. The guy could string me out from the get-go and then pull me back in at his leisure, and this was the power I coveted above all his others.

  “Will, I’m so sorry,” Alyssa said. She seemed taken aback by my reaction and reached out and touched Will’s shoulder, then ran her fingers over his neck, which surprised Casey as much as it did me, because we both looked at each other. In fact, it made Casey clearly and instantly jealous.

  “Don’t be sorry,” he said. “Griffin’s right. It was funny.”

  “You never told me that story,” Casey said. She took the last drag on the joint, squinting extraferociously as she inhaled. “How did that one escape me?”

  “Yeah, well, nobody knows everything about anyone.” Will, who’d just rolled another bone and was holding it toward me, looked me right in the eye, which made me instantly paranoid. Did he know I was fucking Casey? Following this train of thought was very bad, so I recited the mental mantra I employed whenever I got stoned: Grass makes you an ass. It calmed me down, and Will had already shifted his attention to Alyssa. “I mean that,” he said to her. “You can develop a whole moral philosophy around that fact. I’ve been reading Levinas’s Totality and Infinity. His idea that the Other is an infinite …”

  Will began explaining Levinas to Alyssa, who was as enthralled with him as he seemed to be with her. I thought he was trying to get into her pants, and while that might solve some logistical problems, I couldn’t bear how jealous it was making Casey, so I got up and checked out his room, which never ceased to fascinate me. He had two four-foot-tall speakers pointed out his windows, because whenever he cranked up his stereo he wanted to share his musical taste with the whole quad. A big fan of Black Flag and The Replacements and the Butthole Surfers, he had their posters all over his walls, and though I appreciated these outward signs of allegiance, I found the stuff so impossible to listen to that I wondered if I was lacking in musical knowledge. I needed to add some genre to compliment my personality, to be deeply into something. I just hadn’t figured out what yet. Will was not only on the cutting edge musically but also technologically: the hutch above his desk was stuffed with green circuitry boards, floppy disks, wire clippers, a soldering iron. He’d programmed his Macintosh to do all sorts of things, like act as an alarm clock and answering machine; he used HyperCard to create outlines for classes and played strategy and role-playing games on it like MineHunter that to me seemed wildly complicated. He was one of the head techs at the college’s computer lab and had a campus radio show, “Rumor Will,” long musical sets interrupted by programs about the student body and faculty, which he did à la Saturday Night Live’s “Weekend Update.” He was head of a crew that had the coveted Thursday evening shift at the Rathskeller’s downstairs bar. He was so whole that you could tell he would make a bright new place for himself in the world. There was a black-and-white poster on his wall of his father sitting in one of those phallic race cars, wearing a helmet and goggles and waving as he crossed the finish line. When I’d asked Will about it, he told me his dad was in a club back home and had built that car from the ground up. And it didn’t occur to me that a man who belonged to such a club was rich, or that at my age Will was probably trying to figure out how to get rich enough to belong to such a club.